The controls are as silly as the premise, requiring the player to pick up Octodad’s limbs and thrust them around to wriggle his body across the room. My name is Kevin Zuhn, and I was the creative director on Octodad: Dadliest Catch, as well as the project lead on the student game Octodad. I’d like to talk about the design of Dadliest Catch. In particular, the design decisions we made, why we made them, and the impact they had on our development. I want to be detailed, so I apologize if this post-mortem analysis goes long.īecause Octodad was a tangled, difficult, but wildly interesting project to work on, I find it hard to break it down into simple ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ decisions. Given that, I’m just going to walk through the project in a rough chronological order. The student game Octodad had glitchy, unresponsive controls and faulty physics. Our very first task was to overhaul Octodad’s body physics (which I’m not qualified to talk about) and smoothing out the controls. We needed them to be awkward without being frustrating. The key here was giving the player relatively tight control of Octodad’s foot, increasing its speed and reducing its weightiness. As long as the rest of Octodad’s body had follow-through, it could do the business of being a physics destruction engine every time the player moved the foot. The arms got a similar treatment.Įven with tighter controls, Octodad’s body physics would get him and the player into a lot of trouble. It was easy for Octodad to get a leg stuck in a crack between two tables or to catch his foot going up stairs. We created invisible helper forces to get around this, a little boost to push him back on track. ![]() There are forces that help him get over stairs, forces that help him throw objects farther, etc. ![]() As designers, we could pepper force volumes throughout the level anywhere Octodad needed it. If there was a downside to our work on controls, it was our dedication to locking all controls to the mouse. ![]() We ran into awkward situations, as we had only three-ish buttons and loads of limbs. We created ‘mode switching’ to change whether you were controlling Octodad’s arms or his legs, making the mouse buttons contextual.
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